Jack London
By: Lindsay Schwartz
Facts
- Died November 22, 1916
- Real Name: John Griftith Chaney
- Only had a third grade education for the first part of his life.
- became an oyster pirate off the San Fransico bay at age 15.
- Arrested at age 18 for vagrancy, thrown in jail for 30 days.
- started writing at age 17 when his mother pushed him to enter a writing contest. (He won)
-Followed the gold rush and went to Klondike. He became severely malnourished and had to return home. When he arrived home he got the news his step-father, John London, had died.
- Dovoted his life to writing to support his mother.
- Wrote 1,000 words a day
- in the last 20 years of his life he wrote over 50 books.
- married twice and had two daughters
- died from kidney disease in 1916
- died from a combination of morphine and unemia poisoning.
- struggled with alcoholism for most of his life.
Jack London's Life Influences
- London was brought up in a poor family. His paternal father abandoned him and his mother when he found out she was pregnant with Jack. Jack's mother remarried John London soon after Jack was born.
- Since Jack London's biological mother was unable to nurse him London spent a lot of his childhood with Jennie Prentiss who agreed to nurse him. In many ways Jennie Prentiss became London's true mother.
- Herbert Spencer was an english philosopher that highly influenced London's radicalism. He believed in "survival of the fittest".
- Charles Darwin was an english naturalist who coined the term Social Darwinism. He believed in survival of the fittest and London's belief of this became evident in his novel, White Fang.
- Karl Marx introduced London to socialism and his theories gave London inspiration for his collection of essays, "The War of the Classes" in 1905.
These people inspired London's views which he incorporated into his books. His view of survival of the fittest can be seen in his novel, "Call of the Wild."
Quote
~Jack London
Compare and Contrast:
Jack London is now perceived as more of a racist person than before. He refers to the lowest criminal elements as "a new species, a breed of city savages." People believe that it may have been easy for him to confuse the poor with a degenerate species of humanity. Although some believe him to be a little racist today his work is still viewed as some of the best to understand how the poor lived.
Jack London was a very skilled writer that had the ability to write in a way that everyday people could understand. If given this ability I would right about the impact of racism in our society today. People see racism everywhere but it is important to not be a hypocrite and not judge others.
Historiography
This article is correct because of its use of facts to back up the statements made about Jack London. It shows the different sides of London and what caused him to believe in what he believed. He was a complicated, bluntly honest, hypersensitive, and melancholic at moments. His life is sometimes viewed as the best story he ever wrote due to the adventures he went on and the things he did.